My blog generally has between 200-300 visits and 250-450 page views per day (from Sitemeter and Google Analytics) and about 1,350 subscribers (from Feedburner). These figures are still increasing.

Individual posts (vs just the new posts on the blog’s front page) get read between 1 (yes, really!) and 1000 times, depending (I presume) upon their level of interest.

In addition, the blog currently has mainly kept a Google page rank of 6 over the last few years. So if you search on something related to HR, you’re quite likely to come across one of my posts.

The blog is aimed at senior, strategic players in HR and people management (your audience too?) and I post onto it most work days.

Peer and other recognition includes:

Top HR blog to watch 2010

#12 HR blog

#13 global talent management blog

#52 career management blog (#2 in Europe, #1 in UK)

The opportunity

I’m happy to be flexible and look at what will work for you, but my suggestion is that we package three things together:

Your logo centrally positioned on my blog (where you can see the gadget headed ‘Sponsorship’ now)

A description of your offer in the blog sidebar

Sponsored posts

Six sponsored posts, ie one approximately every two months, on topics of your choice, for example on your products / services, clients / customers, projects, research, events, interviews with your people etc (you’d obviously want to choose topics that I and my readers will be interested in)

Each of these posts would be written by me and I would spend whatever time might be needed to research the area, and to draft and agree the post with you (I think offering you the opportunity to review is important, although I would hope that in the main, you would be able to agree with my copy without amendments)

Each of these posts would end with a note indicating that the post has been sponsored by you and repeating the description of your offer / product / service.

You would be my only sponsor from your sector, and one of a maximum of four sponsors (I’m not going to actively pursue this number of sponsors, but this would be the point where I would start to turn potential new sponsors down).

So how much will this cost? Well, I’m able to offer you an introductory rate of £5,000 GBP plus VAT to cover sponsorship, as previously described, over a 12 month period.

As well as helping to promote your brand, this arrangement may provide further benefits in helping me get closer to your company and its products and services (eg through my relationship with my clients). And it will be a lot more cost effective than starting up your own blog.

Still interested?

Have a look through the blog (eg use the blog archives and blog labels towards the top of the middle column to the right of this paragraph)

Thursday, 29 April 2010

Day 1 of the informatology conference focused on learning and technology with a presentation by Sudhir Giri from Google.

Giri is creating a ‘learning ecosystem’ at Google, in order to get people collaborating internally better.

Part of this development is the Google environment and the way this encourages people to naturally interact with each other. This includes lots of shared play and food spaces – for example the cafeteria which gets people communicating with other people they wouldn’t normally have connections with.

And gwhiz – an internal system which allows people to tag others and themselves with technical skills. The higher up the search list someone appears, the more expertise that can be assumed to have. People can also identify whether they are available to answer questions and / or for mentoring. So this provides a rudimentary CV and is much more likely to be used than a traditional skills inventory. And again, it helps people to connect with other folk.

These developments provide a range of intangible benefits for Google but these can’t be captured by a ROI!

The following photos are from the peer circle run following Sudhir’s session, led by Clive Shepherd and including Karyn Romeis, Mark Berthelemy, Charles Jennings and John Castledine:

Monday, 26 April 2010

I had an entertaining and informative meeting with Stacy Chapman from strategic workforce planning firm Aruspex today.

We discussed a range of issues from the need to keep workforce planning strategic (see here and here) to the increasing potential for HCM data. And we found that we agreed on most of these areas.

One other thing that I think we both felt quite passionately about is the dreadful mess integrating Twitter in Linkedin has made of the later’s status updates.

What used to provide a useful way of keeping up with contacts’ activities, has now become a jumble of updates, links and retweets.

Tweets and status updates aren’t the same things. Let’s hope Linkedin de-integrates, and in the meantime, you can always use #in in your tweets to update Linkedin when it’s appropriate as well (but most of the time it’s not!).

Sunday, 25 April 2010

My favourite session at the CIPD’s HRD conference was provided by Tim Ringo, head of IBM HCM consulting, talking about HR transformation at his biggest client: IBM.

One of the things I found particularly interesting was how IBM’s focus on collaboration has supported its HR (and broader business) transformation. Collaboration is culturally expected, and takes place across geographies, timezones and divisions. IBM is therefore a “globally integrated enterprise” or a “post multi-national” and feels the same wherever you touch it.

This culture itself has been supported by social networking (‘same time’ instant messaging, blog central, wiki central, podcasting, social networking and tagging), jamming and knowledge management, and IBM’s opportunity marketplace, allowing employees to access self-service HR information, but also other jobs within IBM (managers finding people and people finding managers).

More recently, the HR transformation has also shifted focus to facilitate increased global collaboration:

Region HR model based on client locations, allowing high touch engagement with business units

Wednesday, 21 April 2010

If you’re a practitioner who uses or are interested in using Twitter or social media, I hope to see you there.

If you’re a supplier, you’re out of luck! No, seriously, we do have supplier places too, but we really want to ensure you’re using social media extensively, and that you’re really going to be bringing one or more practitioners along with you as well. See these posts (1 and 2) for the rationale! So don’t book via Eventbrite but contact us (Gareth Jones or myself) instead – we’ll discuss the opportunity for you to attend with you.

In one way, this recognition means more for more me, partly because I’ve got the no. 1 slot this time around, but also because I’m more focused on talent and human capital management than I am on traditional HR.

But at the same time, talent management is such as overused and misused term, I think the recognition is in some ways less meaningful. It’s certainly the first of thee lists where I don’t actually recognise a lot of the other people who are included.

“We were all surprised by some of the results. As noted earlier, Talent Management is not the most clearly defined silo in HR. Bill Kutik defines it as a suite of software services. Wikipedia’s definition is the full lifecycle harvesting of human capital. Some people mean ‘succession planning’ (that’s roughly how Bersin and associates define it). While others (many of the people on the list) see it as a euphemism for Recruiting.”

Thursday, 15 April 2010

“In today's current economic environment the importance of attracting, motivating, engaging and retaining the industry's highest performing employees has never been more vital to your organisation's success. This year's conference will feature a full day of thought-provoking sessions that will help you discover how to identify and nurture high performers and create the right environments within your organisation for them to thrive.

Why You Should Attend

Guarantee yourself the ultimate learning experience as you explore, learn, share and network at Kenexa's complimentary flagship European event with senior HR members from Europe's most elite organisations.

Learn Best-in-class thought leadership from Europe's top HR influencers around the themes of recruitment and retention

Find out exclusive business research and data around key business metrics and performance

Listen to case study presentations from leading European and global organisations

Gain insight and adopt best practices around the latest HR challenges and innovation

But it’s also because unconferencing plays to the idea of connecting. It’s not a format in which keynote speakers pass content onto passive attendees, but one in which active participants exchange knowledge and ideas (Gareth’s “keynote listeners”) and form and develop relationships.

When Gareth and I started talking about this, we were particularly attracted to the idea of a ‘conflab’:

“Conflabs are conferences where the audience decides what will be talked about. Not in a ‘Whose line is it anyway’ way, but in a way where those attending the conference state what they are interested in, challenged by, concerned with, or questions with which they are struggling.”

To a large extent, camps, unconferences and conflabs are all pretty much the same sort of thing (and are at least all clear about what they’re not, ie a conference). But we do want to stress that we’re trying to get right over to the ‘un’-most side of things.

So this can’t be a Gareth and Jon show – we need to wider and broader involvement and ownership if this thing is going to fly. So if you’re interested, and are based in or can get into London, give us a shout. And I’ll share more ideas here (and probably link to them someplace else) as they develop.

Monday, 5 April 2010

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll understand some of the problems Gareth and I have experienced getting the best mix of people to attend Connecting HR (the London HR tweet-up) last week. But if you were there, or if you’ve scanned the Twitter stream (#ConnectingHR), you’ll understand how valuable getting this right mix has been.

So for our next tweet-up (still provisionally scheduled for 24 June), we’re keen to get the right mix again. This post describes my current thoughts about how we might best do this, and it would be great to know your views (confirmations or challenges).

But firstly, here’s the issue. Many of the most prominent users of social media are consultants / suppliers. Perhaps as a group, we’re just a little more focused on the opportunities it provides for personal branding and marketing? And for similar reasons, we also tend to be some of the most proactive in taking up networking opportunities like tweet-ups. It’s a problem because we want suppliers present at the event (particularly those who are high profile users, but also others who will bring more in-company practitioners along), but we don’t want it to be ONLY suppliers!

Last week’s tweet-up was probably about a third suppliers, a third in-company practitioners, and a third journalists / CIPD / other, which I think worked well. But we only got to this by some fairly un-social actions (telling suppliers who had booked – albeit not meeting the conditions in the booking form - that they wouldn’t be able to attend). This time around, we want to arrive at the same type of mix, but without having to be so unsocial.

How about this idea?:

We ask suppliers to book on the event, but explain this booking is only provisional until nominated to attend by a practitioner.

We transfer the booked suppliers into a list of options that appears in the practitioners’ booking form. We ask each practitioner who books to select one supplier they would most like to attend (this could be made compulsory or left optional).

Once a supplier has been nominated by a practitioner, we remove them from the list of options (so they don’t get nominated twice) and confirm their booking.

It’s a clearer system of nominations than last time (when we asked suppliers to identify who they would be bringing along) and should ensure we don’t need to delete any confirmed supplier bookings. It should mean high profile suppliers find it easy to attend (as they’ll quickly get nominated) but also gives all other suppliers the opportunity to attend as well – they just need to get a practitioner who will nominate them to book and attend as well.

What do you think?- would this work? I’d be very interested in other ideas – particularly any that would provide the same outcomes without being quite so complicated….